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Former Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel. Image via Wikipedia

Within the last 12 months, cheating in college athletics has taken center stage as many of the nation's highest-profile institutions have been investigated and punished. Or are currently being investigated and awaiting punishment.

USC, Ohio State, and Tennessee are just some of the schools that have made recent headlines for NCAA infractions violations. Coaches and athletic directors have lost their jobs, schools have lost a bit of their athletic luster, and fans have lost hope that their upcoming season will bear fruit.

The analogies between what has transpired in college athletics is striking to other bouts of cheating we've witnessed over the last decade in sports:

If you saw the movie Beautiful Mind starring Russell Crowe about the life of brilliant yet troubled Nobel Prize winning economist John Nash, you'll have an appreciation for the concept of Game Theory...which in layperson's terms is the study of how people and firms strategically interact under various stimuli, including the choices and behaviors of other people.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a common paradigm in Game Theory which can be typified with this classic example copied from the Wikipedia link: